Tod Goldberg

An Unacceptable Death: Remembering Barbara Seranella

I did something the other day by accident that I'd been avoiding on purpose for three years: I deleted an email from my friend, the mystery writer Barbara Seranella. Barbara died in January of 2007 while awaiting a third liver transplant (she suffered liver failure as a result of catching Hepatitis C from a dirty needle several years before) and since then I'd been holding an email of hers in my inbox. I'd read it every now and then, usually after remembering some funny story she told, or after seeing someone in Target who looked like her (my wife Wendy and I used to constantly run into Barbara at Target -- she lived just a few blocks from us --  and then three of us would stand in the aisle gossiping about books and writers and mutual friends and acquaintances, because Barbara always had the best gossip and always wanted to hear whatever you knew, too...sometimes, you'd tell her a bit of gossip and the next time she saw you, she'd tell it back to you, forgetting that you were the one who told her in the first place) or after realizing, yet again, that she was dead. This might sound odd, but sometimes I forget that she's gone and wonder if I'll see her at a particular event, or I'll think, oh, I haven't seen Barbara in a while, I should call her...and then sometimes I see her books on my shelf and I wonder how it's possible that someone filled with so many words could be silent for so long now. The email was pretty innocuous. It said: "I'm in Ohio hooked up to a stupid machine but I'm looking forward to seeing you in April. Keep the date open." I don't recall precisely what we were planning on doing exactly, but I remember the plan was to do some talks together locally because we always had such a fun time when we did our little song and dance together. I'd just taken a job at UCR Palm Desert and we'd talked about setting up a crime writer's conference out here. Maybe that's what it was. Or maybe we were just going to have lunch. I guess it doesn't matter, really. She'd not leave Ohio. By April she'd already been gone three months.   

Now it's three years. Three years in the writing world is forever. Three years means that now there are mystery readers who've never heard of her. Many of her books have fallen out of print. She was never a huge seller nationally (though several of her books reached bestseller lists and won awards) but that never seemed to bother her, but when I ask people now if they've heard of her and they say no, I get so angry. How could they not know of her? 

A few months ago, Wendy and I moved into a new house and so we had to pack up all of our books and put them into boxes. When I got to the S section, I pulled out our copies of Barbara's books and read the inscriptions. She wrote silly things inside of them -- she teased me for years about not ironing my clothes very well and for showing up places looking like I'd just woken up and that continued inside the books, too -- because that's what friends do inside each other's books. But what suddenly took my breath away was the realization that she'd held this book, that she'd put her pen inside of it, had pressed down and made words. Wendy saw me standing in our living room holding her books and told me she missed her, too. 

And so this email, the point of all of this, has sat there in my inbox for years. Every time I go through and purge my old mail, I make sure that I don't delete it. It makes me sad every time I see it, which made me think in the past that it was foolish to keep it sitting there, always waiting to make me tear up at the most inopportune time -- like the time at my office on campus a few weeks ago, right before I was to meet with a student, and I had to search my mail for something and it popped up on my screen like a ghost and reminded me that we were going to have a writer's conference, weren't we? -- because the thing about Barbara's death was that she was terribly young, just 50, but had lived only a portion of her new clean life. She paid the price for a dangerous youth, certainly, but who hasn't? Just not all of us died for our folly. I still cannot wrap my mind around that, I suppose, and that email promising me of some date in April made her seem perpetual still. April is always coming up. 

But life goes on. And email piles up. And so one day a few weeks ago I decided that 18 months worth of mail was just too much. I blocked and deleted from January 2009 backward. I didn't even bother to look at what the final date was or whose email I was losing. I just wanted to be free of it all. Email feels mostly like an impermanent thing as it is and yet I end up hoarding it for far too long just in case...just in case of what I have no idea. I didn't realize I'd deleted Barbara's email until a few days ago. I was sitting at my desk going through some old papers and saw her name on an ad for a bizarre book signing we'd done together years previous with a local newswoman and a self-help guru. She was so alive to me in that moment and so I went to see her last words to me and they were gone.  I felt ashamed for a moment, as if I'd somehow done something wrong to the memory of my friend, and then realized this was the very behavior she'd have mocked me for. So I didn't even go check to see if the email was sitting in the deleted file still. I just let it go and decided that the best thing to do would be to talk a bit about this wonderful person who, if you've never heard of her, happened to write some very fine crime novels that I think you'd enjoy.

Live & Angry Next Tuesday

This Tuesday at 7pm marks the debut of the Lit Thing Book Bash at the MBar in Los Angeles, as hosted by the lovely Cecil Castellucci. Unlike other reading series where you're expected to, you know, read from your book, we've been charged with ranting about books that irreparably fucked us up. I'm sure my cohorts for the evening will be talking about very important works of literature, but I've decided to take the high road: I'm talking about Choose Your Own Adventure Books completely screwed with me. There might be a slide show. But for sure, I will be talking about Your Code Name Is Jonah, which was my entry drug and might well be the one book that has informed my writing career the most. For reals.

 

Letters To Parade: And, Marilyn, Could You Convince Me Bigfoot Doesn't Exist, Too?

The burden of being the Smartest Person On The Face Of The Earth (as Marilyn Vos Savant absolutely is, or claims to be, or was anointed by the Scientologists or the Vatican or the secret cabal of Jews who run the liberal media or by virtue of having the largest brain stem according to the Guinness Book of World Records) is that you end up being the final word on some of humanity's most important questions as posed by, of course, humanity's biggest fucktards. There was the time she solved the gay, of course, and there was that time she solved some complex equation involving, uh, Monty Hall that still has mathematical geniuses the world over jerking off all over themselves in anger and resentment. But rarely has Marilyn needed to solve a question of bigger and more profound importance that what looms as humanity's most enduring mystery: The presumptive end of the world when the Mayan calendar ends in 2012. 

D. Jones of Hanover, Mass has some real worries, it seems, and even though he lives in a state that just elected the fucking Manchurian Candidate -- check the hair, people -- and even though John Cusack already saved the world from 2012 this summer by standing in front of it playing "In Your Eyes" on a boom box (I didn't see the movie, but I assume that's how he did it), he still feels the need to turn to the one person on earth who can convince him that the world is not going belly up on January 1st, 2013:

"I am worried about the year 2012, when the Mayan calendar is said to predict the end of the world in December. Can you add some logic to calm the hysteria?"

I know when I'm concerned about a particular fucktard conspiracy -- the Illuminati, President Obama's birth record, the Zionist conspiracy, JaMarcus Russell's plot to ruin my fucking life -- the first place I turn to for truth and honesty is Parade, the magazine which brought us Osama Bin Laden's death, Barbaro's great health and Lindsey Lohan's clean living ways. I mean, D. Jones could just pick up an old calendar from, say, 2009 and note that there's not another month after December and then fist himself to see if he's still living here in 2010. Or he could even go to Staples and pick up an 18 month calendar and really fuck with himself, I suppose. That D. Jones accurately calls his emotional state of being "hysteria" is somewhat surprising, though knowing you're crazy doesn't stop you from being crazy. But knowing you're crazy and thinking Marilyn Vos Savant is somehow going to make it all right means, well, that means you're crazy and a complete and utter fucktard. You trust Marilyn Vos Savant with the fate of humanity, at least as you see it, anyway. And that, well, that's fucking scary in ways I cannot quantify.

Fortunately, Marilyn has the answers...or, well, she provides some logic but still gives this fucking maniac D. Jones, who is likely building a bunker in his backyard made entirely out of cocker spaniel heads and the hair he collects from the garbage bins behind Fantastic Sams, a window of possibility:

"Logic can't prove that the prediction is wrong, but it can offer plenty of reassurance in the form of this reasoning: The Mayans were smart, but they weren't any smarter than we are, we are vastly more knowledgeable in every way. Plus, present-day science is far in advance of what was known only a century ago, and the peak of the Mayan civilization was more than 1000 years ago. And modern scientists don't predict that anything especially troubling will occur during the year 2012."

I imagine D. Jones' response would probably be: "So, so, so, that shit could happen then? Because scientists are part of the Zionist conspiracy. None of them say Jesus rode dinosaurs, you know, so I don't believe a word they say. Jesus was alive over a 1000 years ago, too, and everything he says is true, so that 1000 year thing, that doesn't hold water with me. I mean, basically, what you're saying is, yeah, it could happen. Would you advocate that I hoard gold or gasoline? And if shit goes Thunderdome, where do I have the best chance to survive those rabid little kids?"